Being huge Kotlin fans ourselves, we are quite happy about this release – especially after Google announced official Kotlin support for Android. If you did not try Kotlin yet, you really should. It is a great improvement over Java.

Special thanks to our community on Github who helped us with feedback on prior release candidates for the Kotlin feature. You’re awesome! Technically, Kotlin support was a bigger step than one might expect. Indeed, we had to completely replace some build components that operated exclusively on Java source code. The new build tools are based on standard annotation processing and a class transformer. This works with a variety of JVM based languages.

Using Kotlin for entities is simple and saves you a lot of code:

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@Entity

data classPerson(

@Id varid:Long=0,

varname:String

)

Going forward, we will replace the Java-based Gradle plugin with the new build tools in a future release. Consequently, at that point we will drop the in-place Java source generation in entity classes.